The new year starts for me without any resolutions. Dealing with things that fragile and likely to break makes me nervous, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have new year habits for January. Some of you have been with me long enough to have seen one of them – my annual reading inventory for the preceding year.
I read 82 books in 2017, not counting those requested by the two nearby grandsons who need a book read before nap, after nap, while they are eating lunch, or just because. Forty were for adults, thirty-two were for middle grade or young adult, and ten were for young children. The books were 71% fiction and 29% nonfiction. A protagonist that fit somewhere in the category of diversity made up 34% of the books.
I thought I might give some shout-outs to the top and bottom of my list for the year. The best pairing of books that were for different ages was the adult book The Radium Girls, a nonfiction account by Kate Moore, and Glow, a young adult fictional account by Megan E. Bryant, of one of those girls as her life might have been lived. I read Glow first, but knowing what I know now, I would have reversed the order. Either way is fine, but I do recommend both.
The best sequel set in my list for this year belongs to Linda Williams Jackson with Midnight Without a Moon and A Sky Full of Stars. The pair fit as nicely together as their titles with hints of the night sky. They are also the books that most left me wanting more, which makes me happy that a trilogy is possible.
The very worst book was The White Rose of Memphis by Wm. C. (Clarke) Falkner. Out of curiosity aroused by its mention in Myself and My World, an excellent biography by Robert 
Hamblin of his famous grandson William Faulkner, I thought I’d see how the grandfather wrote. That was one wasted bit of curiosity.
Along with my inventory, I have also tried to look back to see what worked for me and what did not in 2017 and look forward to how to make it better in the coming year. A big part of that search is to find a way to work more books into my schedule. My “read soon” stack is getting out of hand.